Marshall to Put Old Face on New Addition : Architecture: After a plan for a plain annex to the Gothic-style high school met with protests, an alumnus came up with a design to complement the old style.

LOS FELIZ — John Marshall High School holds a special place in the hearts of Los Feliz residents.

They battled for years to protect Marshall’s distinctive Gothic-style architecture after the Los Angeles Unified School District announced plans to replace the school, which was damaged in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Instead of demolishing the original buildings, the district agreed to undertake the higher cost of reinforcing them from within.

So when the district last year presented a plan to build a new annex on the campus, Marshall fans reviewed it skeptically and judged it too plain to complement the ornate brick and stone style that has made the 64-year-old school a regular backdrop on television shows.

They launched a quiet campaign--which eventually reached Sacramento--to produce a more ornamental design and get the funds to pay for it. As a result, community leaders say, the two-story classroom complex under construction will more closely fit the Marshall look.

The changes will reflect the influence of Michael B. Lehrer, a Marshall alumnus and local architect, who was recruited by the Los Feliz Improvement Assn. to work with the school district’s architectural firm, Leo A. Daly.

Working on his own time, Lehrer modified Daly’s plan, changing the ornamentation of one of the three buildings from vertical to horizontal and adding detail. Even the project’s architects liked the results better. It “probably made more sense,” said Jared Sloan, Leo A. Daly’s project manager for the Marshall addition.

Leo A. Daly’s design for the facade included unbroken vertical brick stripes between the windows, Sloan said. “What we were trying to do is maintain some relationship to (Marshall’s) original design. We probably didn’t see the forest for the trees.”

Lehrer proposed a facade with horizontal bands of brick alternating with plaster in the spaces between the windows. The plaster will be painted to pick up the color of the stone on the original Marshall High School building, Sloan said.

At Lehrer’s suggestion, the building will also include raised molding--about 10 inches thick--on the top and bottom of every window. The molding will “add some relief and shadow,” said Lehrer, who graduated from Marshall High School in 1971.

Lehrer said preparing a design was only half of his job. He also had to persuade community members that a much simpler building could still complement Marshall’s collegiate Gothic architecture. Not every public building can be a showpiece, he said.

Because of budget constraints, the facade will only cover three sides of just one of the three buildings that make up the new classroom addition. The facade will face Tracy Street, as does the original Marshall High School building, and it will decorate the most visible of the three new structures, Lehrer said. Landscaping will be used around the other plaster building faces, which have no facade treatment, Lehrer said.

In any case, Lehrer explained, “historically, you wouldn’t put fancy marble and fancy stones on building faces that nobody could see.”

The compromise version might not have been affordable without assistance from the area’s state senator and an unexpected boost from the downturn in the economy.

When architects presented their plan to the community last year, they were unsure whether their budget would allow for any kind of a brick facade, Sloan said. Leo A. Daly had eliminated the facade from their design after construction bids came in $1 million over budget in 1988, he said.

But then the construction market took a turn for the worse, and the bid eventually accepted by the district was $300,000 under the $3.2-million budget allotted by the state for the project.

When a bid for an expansion of a school is under the budget, the extra funds usually revert to the state to be used for other school construction projects, said Jon Cua, facilities project manager for Los Angeles Unified School District. However, the district, with help from State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), persuaded the state agency responsible for financing school construction projects to return the excess funds to the Marshall project.

As it turns out, the state was receptive to the concerns of the Los Feliz community, Cua said. “That’s the last of our Gothic architecture.”

In addition to paying for the new facade, the $300,000 in extra funds will also pay for the construction of a computer laboratory and a study hall, Cua said.

The new buildings are expected to be completed by the end of November, Sloan said.

Deborah Leidner, principal of Marshall High School, said she is happy the funds were made available for the facade.

“This community fought a 10-year battle after the ’71 earthquake to preserve” Marshall High School from demolition, she said. “We’re all interested in having something that aesthetically fits into the neighborhood.”